ABSTRACT
The increasing consumers' awareness of food quality and safety is boosting the research field in food authentication. In food authentication, the analytical detection methods are an important first line of defense and spectroscopy plays a primary role. The chapter describes the workflow for a food authentication fingerprinting procedure based on spectroscopy. Usually, a fingerprinting procedure based on spectroscopy includes the following steps: definition of the objectives and design of experiments, sample handling and preparation, measurement of the food fingerprint, data preprocessing, data analysis and validation strategy. The chapter considers the key points of each steps, taking examples from four most often investigated food matrices: meat, fish, honey, and olive oil. In the attempt of improving food authentication, a further step can be the combination of the outputs obtained from multiple instrumental sources. A separate discussion is reserved for data fusion because this practice can make more difficult the spectroscopy data elaboration.
